Twitter Beats Facebook in Ad Revenue, Google still Dominates

eMarketer
has released a new report which outlines the state of the mobile
advertising market in the U.S. According to the agency, the U.S. mobile
ad market will be worth $2.6 billion in 2012. Most of the value will be
captured by Google, which will account for around 56% of all mobile ad
sales, or nearly $1.45 billion. The other two major players are Facebook
and Twitter. Surprisingly, despite being much larger than Twitter,
Facebook is expected to generate only around half as much in mobile ad
revenue.

Twitter is expected to make around $129.7 million, while Facebook
will generate $72.7 million. This highlights the problems Facebook is
facing in trying to generate revenue by monetizing its massive mobile
audience, which has been one of the major factors driving its stock
price down.
Eventually, we expect Facebook to figure out the mobile monetization
puzzle, and become the second largest player in the mobile ad space
after Google. The report expects that to happen as soon as next year.
Facebook could also lead the mobile display ad market by 2014, which
is currently led by Pandora and Google. While the mobile search ad
market will be dominated by Google completely, the mobile display ad
market will be more balanced in terms of players.
The entire mobile ad market is expected to be worth $11.86 billion in
2016. If Facebook figures out a way to capitalize on this, its share
price would rebound just as quickly as it fell. Google will try its best
to continue to dominate the market though. It’s highly likely it’ll
succeed in the mobile search ad space, but not social or display ads.